Fix + Foxy’s Dark Noon (June 7 - July 7, 2024) took the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe by storm. In it, South African artists including co-director and choreographer Nhlanhla Mahlangu and seven South African actors join forces with acclaimed Danish director Tue Biering and create an exhilarating theatrical experience. Dark Noon turns the myth of the American Wild West, as endlessly glorified by Hollywood westerns of the 1950s, on its head. This time, rather than history being told by the victors, it is told by the vanquished. On a vast bare stage, the skeleton film set of a Western town emerges in real time. The extraordinary actors embody the distinctive characters of America’s past: cowboys, gold seekers, missionaries, enslaved Africans, Chinese workers, Native Americans, prostitutes, Bluecoats, and Confederates. Through playful interpretation, the performers scrutinize the presumptions and misconceptions of the American Frontier. “Dripping with energy, irony and anger,” this “savage and gripping” work “tells the 300-year history of the American west in 100 uproarious minutes” (The Guardian).
What impressed me about the hyperkinetic piece — written and directed by the Danish Tue Biering, co-directed and choreographed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu — is its recognizing the marked difference between the lessons learned by American youth of the DuMont days and the takeaways that the South Africans reaped at a later date. Put succinctly, stateside viewers were indulged in visions of what could be distilled to a Cowboys-and-Indians ethic. They (we?) were shown partial truths indelibly integrated, a template for games played in local schoolyards. In contrast, South Africans were exposed to an up-close-and-personal look at white dominance of a country where other immigrants — slaves and the Chinese imported as cheap labor to lay the cross-country railroad — were seen as second-class citizens, or worse. (Is there any need to note it’s a cock-eyed assessment too often enduring today?)
Dark Noon’s defining feature is the way the narrative can swing from over-the-top hilarity to darkly sobering in a matter of seconds. The episodic nature can wear a little thin at times, especially as the pioneer town advances and the focus spirals in different directions. Nevertheless, Dark Noon is an arresting story that packs a punch, especially performed in the country it so expertly lampoons. The show’s most poignant moment comes at the epilogue, when the actors cast off their roles and speak directly, earnestly, to the camera as themselves. One by one, they tell us about their childhoods in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, about the influence of the guns and violence gleefully portrayed in American movies, and the personal, real-life harm that was caused.
2024 | Off-Broadway |
St. Ann's Warehouse Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
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